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Failure teaches success

After doing something, people will often grade their performance as a “failure” or a “success”. If you completed your goal, you succeeded, if not, you failed. Success=good and failure=bad. While this may be true in the short term, what many people don’t realize is that failure teaches success in the future.

How failure teaches success

First let me say that I’m not being perfectly literal here. Failure doesn’t mean that you will instantly learn how to succeed every time in the future. This blog won’t teach you how to do that. No blog will teach you how to do that. In fact, nothing can ever can teach you how to do that. What you can, and will have the chance to do, is look back at what you did, and see your mistakes. The trick is to always look back at what you did. You’re more likely to notice mistakes when you’re looking for them. For example, check out this video where you count how many times the white team passes the ball.

Failure is acceptable

Everybody fails. If one of the players from the above video took 100 shots, they might hit 49 of them, and feel bad for hitting less than half of their shots. However, that would still put them on even terms with Michael Jordan, considered by most to be the best basketball player ever.If you’ve ever wondered what he thought of that, he’s spoken out on it.

See that? That is a multi-millionaire who is the best ever at his profession, a man with more wealth and success than most people could have total in 1000 lifetimes saying he’s proud of how often he’s failed.

What I’m teaching you

I’m not telling you to fail on purpose. I am also not telling you that if you screw up 99 times that time number 100 will work out for you. What I am saying is that if you don’t let failure get you down, and learn how to be more confident, that failing doesn’t mean you’re a failure.

Chris Viola is a certified digital marketing professional from Hamilton, Ontario.